We Tend to Be Apprehended Eventually After a Futile but All the More Spirited Attempt at First Degree Self-Impersonation

• I knew that for many dogs chocolate can be toxic, but I didn't know it can be toxic for cats too (and, after thirty plus years of constant cat ownership, as in thirty plus years of being worked by cats, I had never known a cat to eat chocolate), but hey, chocolate can be toxic to cats! We've the Stanley shit smears, shit stains, shit dribbles to prove it. Took him to Nebel Street Emergency at 330 this morning, they said the doctor was out, could we come back in two hours, gave us the name of Hope Emergency, on Taft Court off Gude near Southlawn in Rocketville, Mocomofos use Nebel if you must but use Hope if you can.
• Confirmation it was chocolate made by vet when she pulled two of the white paper strings and bits of aluminum foil from Hershey's kisses out of Stanley's diarrhea.
• He'll be fine, eventually.
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Dishdogavitch.
• The most patriotic photo ever taken of him.
• Too fast too furious: The key is that a society undergoing acceleration gets caught in a feedback loop it cannot escape, whereby acceleration in production, circulation, and distribution (in Rosa’s terms, “technical acceleration”) drives social change. The institutions of society no longer guarantee stable life paths. If in classical modernity people could imagine their lives in intergenerational terms — say, the same firm passing down through a bourgeois family — in late capitalism, turnover is so accelerated that it becomes hard to imagine one’s life course even within a few years, let alone a few generations. This in turn drives a sense of the acceleration of the “pace of life,” the psychological feeling of always being out of breath — which in turn drives the desire for more labor-saving technology, and technical change. There have been world-historical short-circuits in this loop — the 1930s, which spelled forced leisure for thousands, and the 1970s, when advances in technical change and the rate of profitability they promised seemed to meet a historic limit — but overall the pressure hasn’t slackened. For Rosa, modernity is defined by a continual sense of the present contracting—a feeling that what one is able to do within a given time frame is shrinking. The feeling comes about because the variety of social experiences available is ceaselessly proliferating: the number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large, and expands every day with implacable speed.
• Men of Goodwill, Britain edition. 
• Man smiles proudly at killing bear. What the fuck is wrong with people? 
• Ohio man ordered to take down Zombie Nativity Scene.
• Food links.
• Crooning on Venus, coda. UPDATE! plus more.
• Borges, for those of you who do.
• Do you know that many people don't know who Jorma Kaukonen and Adrian Belew are nor are they hankering to hear Kaukonen and Belew songs? I'm stupid, this surprises me still.
• Was here:

IMAGO

Franz Wright

From my cell I was staring at a cloud, a dog decaying in the woods, etc., as I took up the long-awaited sequel to my Confessions. By this time my hand was so far away that it looked like a small hairless spider whose progress I could hardly help but follow, from the corner of one eye, as it went on filling page after page in a notebook the size of a stamp with words too small for anyone to read. I looked up and noticed my bars had turned to gold. And before I forget, I’d like to be the first to congratulate everyone who has not committed suicide up until now. Camouflaged and lightless congregation, the world will never know your names, never know of its debt to you, or what you suffered; with what uncomplaining anguish you sacrificed the one thing all hold most dear, most have in common, the sense of being completely different from anybody else—it just vanished at some point, having attained its sexually mature and winged stage. You had a great vision about it, but told no one. We have misnamed death life and life death. You saw another world, and it was precisely the same as this one. This time you told everyone, until someone asked you very nicely to quiet down. And the weather—everything you have heard on that subject is a serious understatement. The scarlet horrors were preparing to file in for my ignominious obsequies, already they swarmed freely over my body. Then, there was no weather. I can’t tell you how perfect that was. As it happens I had been gazing up at the dusk stars, as I can be found doing more or less day and night, for I like to think they are growing younger as I die, come by some time and tell me what you think. Under torture—some atrocious form of tickling, for example—I guess I’d describe myself as a fairly good egg in hot water. Family motto roughly translates, April wizards bring May blizzards. We tend to be apprehended eventually, after a futile but all the more spirited attempt at first degree self-impersonation; however, this is not the time for levity, we happen to be speaking of a serious medical goodnight kiss. Traditionally, we are then detained at a local mental facility known for its celebrated alumni, though in recent decades secret and permanent socialist elements in the government have seen to it that the lowest scum of humanity now appear to have open access to those once hallowed halls smeared with our shit and vomit. What I’m getting at is this: after a relatively brief stay, we are invariably released with some deranged doctor’s or other’s blessing, a mixture of relief and disgust on the part of the staff, and the secret eye-signal that will get you into any movie house in Milwaukee free for the next year. Some of us like to get together once a day, rain or shine, and gather furtively at the picnic grounds under those tall wavering candleflame pines, where neither moth nor rust can reach, nor faintest scream, and exchange ribald tales verging on satanic perversion, each drawing his iridescent injection from the same oceanic martini, very dry, about two tears’ worth of vermouth, in an unremembered dream.

Conspiracy of Air, Conspiracy of Ice, the Silver Trout Is Thirsty for Morning, the Prairie Dog Shivers with Sweat

• Late today, dentist appointment early, then lap filled above with Rosie and Stanley instead of laptop.
• The Democratic Party as voter suppression tool of the GOP: I've been thinking about Earthgirl not voting this past Tuesday. Yes, the old conspiratorialist in me would have suggested that Triskelions ordered Team Democrat to suck this much - I mean beyond standard Triskelion orders that Team Democrat suck this much - in the two years between POTUS 12 and the 14 mid-terms to demoralize the Democratic base in a massive (and massively successful) voter suppression campaign. Planet and I have talked Democrat's suckful complicity in expanding, deepening, and accelerating the clusterfuck at Earthgirl relentlessly it's true, but Earthgirl is of her own well-informed mind (and people can vouch), and for her to say Fuck That and not walk the one hundred yards to a voting booth and not vote for the first time she's been eligible is a remarkable development.
• Actually, the old conspiratorialist in me was saying in early 2009 that the Obama presidency was ordained to lay the groundwork, under the banner of professional Democratic Liberalism, for the GOP demolition crew in 2017 and that Obama's last two years would be devoted to ensuring the death of the legacy of New Deal Democrats.
• On reading what he wrote 35 years earlier: Things are worse today, of course. The rise of Fox News, Bush Junior’s war crimes, Barack Obama’s disastrous entrenchment and expansion of the Permanent War State, the now-total takeover of society by the 1-Percenter Kleptocracy, the utter degradation of the national ‘debate’ and democracy itself:  the past's rough beasts have grown gargantuan, the lies are higher and wider, the rot is deeper. But in another sense, nothing had changed; and certainly, despite expending millions of furious words, I had changed nothing, nothing at all.
• Grapefruit moon with murmurations.
• WFMU has released it's Winter schedule. Good news! Hazleton and Jarnow and McDowell are back on the schedule! Bad news! Bodeh and Julie and Faye are gone. I wonder how this works - are DJs given the option to go or stay and all changes made according to those DJs who no longer want or are no longer able to do the show? Does Station Manager Ken look at fund-raising totals for individual DJs and say, You, get out! or, in one of his daily apoplectic fits scream I hate you, get out? When will I get my three hour show?

FOUR QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE DREAMS OF ANIMALS

Susan Stewart

1. Is it true that they dream?
  
      It is true, for the spaces of night surround them with shape and purpose, like a warm hollow below the shoulders, or between the curve of thigh and belly.
      The land itself can lie like this. Hence our understanding of giants.
      The wind and the grass cry out to the arms of their sleep as the shore cries out, and buries its face in the bruised sea.
      We all have heard barns and fences splintering against the dark with a weight that is more than wood.
      The stars, too, bear witness. We can read their tails and claws as we would read the signs of our own dreams; a knot of sheets, scratches defining the edges of the body, the position of the legs upon waking.
      The cage and the forest are as helpless in the night as a pair of open hands holding rain.

2. Do they dream of the past or of the future?

      Think of the way a woman who wanders the roads could step into an empty farmhouse one afternoon and find a basket of eggs, some unopened letters, the pillowcases embroidered with initials that once were hers.
      Think of her happiness as she sleeps in the daylilies; the air is always heaviest at the start of dusk.
      Cows, for example, find each part of themselves traveling at a different rate of speed. Their bells call back to their burdened hearts the way a sparrow taunts an old hawk.
      As far as the badger and the owl are concerned, the past is a silver trout circling in the ice. Each night he swims through their waking and makes his way back to the moon.
    Clouds file through the dark like prisoners through an endless yard. Deer are made visible by their hunger.
    I could also mention the hopes of common spiders: green thread sailing from an infinite spool, a web, a thin nest, a child dragging a white rope slowly through the sand.

3. Do they dream of this world or of another?

    The prairie lies open like a vacant eye, blind to everything but the wind. From the tall grass the sky is an industrious map that bursts with rivers and cities. A black hawk waltzes against his clumsy wings, the buzzards grow bored with the dead.
    A screendoor flapping idly on an August afternoon or a woman fanning herself in church; this is how the tails of snakes and cats keep time even in sleep.
    There are sudden flashes of light to account for. Alligators, tormented by knots and vines, take these as a sign of grace. Eagles find solace in the far glow of towns, in the small yellow bulb a child keeps by his bed. The lightning that scars the horizon of the meadow is carried in the desperate gaze of foxes.
    Have other skies fallen into this sky? All the evidence seems to say so.
    Conspiracy of air, conspiracy of ice, the silver trout is thirsty for morning, the prairie dog shivers with sweat. Skeletons of gulls lie scattered on the dunes, their beaks still parted by whispering. These are the languages that fall beyond our hearing.
    Imagine the way rain falls around a house at night, invisible to its sleepers. They do not dream of us.

4. How can we learn more?
  
    This is all we will ever know.

I've Pressed So Far Way from My Desire that If You Asked Me What I Want I Would, Accepting the Harmonious Completion of the Drift, Say Annihilation, Probably

That's Rosie in a tunnel, shot last night. Abbreviated bleggalgazing - I took a day off, nothing more, thanks for asking. That's not entirely true, I was asked, yes, that's true. Was going to take today off too but in view of the fact that A.R. Ammons was born eighty-seven years ago today and today is an Egoslavian High Holy Day, can't. Use the search box top left of this blog to find many of his poems. All you need know about Obama: the fucker tucks his polo shift into his short pants. Sludge in the hour glass. Your Fucking Washington Post gives Sunday oped inches to Donald Rumsfeld to complain about the elimination of Olympic wrestling. Your Fucking Washington Post gives Sunday oped inches to E.J. Dionne to make an impassioned case that the next pope should be a nun. I say the next pope should be a duck. There is a better chance I will be happy before E.J. Dionne. Blinder leading the blind. History unfolding. The discontents of post-democracy. The logic of surveillance. Of course they are. The Lincoln Myth of Social Mobility. No, I don't make fun of rightwingers much anymore (since I was asked why I don't much anymore over the weekend), though once that was what drew new eyes here, and probably still would. Fabulous heh. Boatloads of links. MOCO seeks to be hip! Lordy, Arsenal losing makes me giddy. Robbie Rogers. Blanchot novella, for those of you who do. Beckett, for those of you who do. Barth, for those of you who do. Quest into the unknown. The problem with anthologies. Well, not the problem, some of many problems.  A Greyhoos playlist. Messiaen. Via Edmond, Mike Watt & The Missingmen cover Wire. Three hours of excellent. Three hours of excellent. Here's Stanley on a balcony from this morning.

CONTINUITY

A.R. Ammons

I've pressed so
far way from
my desire that

if you asked
me what I
want I would,

accepting the harmonious
completion of the
drift, say annihilation,

probably.

For His Birthday, I Gave Stanley a Hyacinth Bean, an Annual, so He Wouldn't Have to Wait for the Flowers

That's the latest in the Stanley in a Bag series. In response to my speculations/inquiries re: political demographics of Ohio (where day after tomorrow I drive to take Planet back to college), G, good friend of Landru, sent along some Kind and this:

We live in Cincinnati, and I wanted to remark on the demographics of Ohio (in response to Planet being in Ohio all fall).  Despite appearances, Cincinnati proper is pretty blue.  (Take a gander at the 2008 results map here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Ohio,_2008 )  The four isolated blue counties in the southern half of the state are those around Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Athens.  The burbs in those counties and around are undeniably red, and the redrawn districts (done by a Republican legislature) after the 2010 census favors (surprisingly enough) the Republicans.  All of those democratic counties in the southern half of the state are split in half, so that the republican burbs and surrounding counties can overwhelm a divided democratic city.  See the map here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oh_districts_map.PNG .   Honestly, I don' t know how they keep getting away with this crap.

I'm sure that there are more Democratic voters than Republican--the election will turn on whether the Democrats will actually vote, and how many shenanigans will get in the way of the process.  (I still have bitter memories of 2004, when long lines in understaffed Democratic districts turned people away, while the Republican districts didn't seem to have such problems.  Well, that and the Diebold thing.)

And the followed-up: I used the 2008 map to show that Hamilton is blue; upon further research I've learned it has been red in the previous 3 presidential elections, and in many of the 'tweeners, but it has generally been closely divided between the city and the burbs.  I will always maintain, however, that something was seriously fishy in the 2004 election.  I work in (and drive through, to and from) a very Republican part of the county; US Rep Steve Chabot-R (of the combover fame) lives near where I work. I saw an overwhelming number of Democratic signs in the run-up to the 2004 election, to the extent that I actually and foolishly was convinced that Ohio would turn for Kerry.  I saw much less visible support for Obama in the same neighborhood in 2008, yet the county did come in Democratic that year.  Damn Diebolds. 

Offered here for my three Ohioan blogbuds. Living in MOCO, I get some of the POTUS noise in commercials run at NOVA, and puke-sound. The blarg in Ohio is gonna suck. Anyway, thank you, G, for the info and Kind words. Hey! Everyone, send me stuff. Here's the flagship of the Stanley in a Bag series:

• Crackers in bed. Made you look. Thanks Edmond!
• I was going to throw this 144 exactly twit in the wind: Getting outraged that Romney's outraged that Obama's acting outraged to exploit a Romney gaffe (plug variables in any order) is swirly dumb. Fuck it.
• Obama's constitution.
• Panopticon.
• What the fuck is a Ed Schultz?
• America will be Britain first on its way to Serbia.
• The American Conservative on American Conservatism. I've never said they aren't whack.
• Metaphor for something. 
• I've been using headers one out of three or four nights, gonna leave Stanley up there for the meantime just because.
• Read this out loud. No, really: Poor Americans die five years younger than the rich and are likelier to say that parents should stay together for the sake of the children. Black Americans, unlike white Americans, do not live longer if they marry rather than cohabit. Black women are, unlike white women and black men, expected to be assertive in the workplace; are as likely as white men to be ticketed during traffic stops; and tend toward obesity if they have been abused as children. Sons who have been abused by their fathers and daughters who have been abused by their mothers are especially prone to cancer. Fatherhood reduces gay men’s HIV risk. Children exposed to HIV in the womb are more likely to become deaf. Mother goats remember, for over a year after weaning, the voices of their kids. The death of a child increases a mother’s immediate risk of death by 133 percent. Women who have difficulty conceiving children are more likely to experience psychiatric hospitalization. California scientists disagreed with Danish scientists’ assertion that occasional binge drinking during pregnancy may be safe. Bullies peak in seventh grade. Cities polluted by leaded gasoline turn children violent. Two thirds of U.S. teenagers experience uncontrollable rage. Head injuries, undereducation, and farming make Americans punch and kick in their sleep. Ambient bullying makes employees want to quit. A landscape architect designed an edible playground for autistic children. There are two more paragraphs at the link. Read them out loud too.
• United plays in Montreal at four today. Don't know if I'll be able to see it - Comcast is showing a motherfucking exhibition helmetball game, I wonder if they'll blackout MLS Live like they normally do.
• Bob Ross on art and capitalism!
• Beefheart!

HEAVEN FOR STANLEY

Mark Doty

For his birthday, I gave Stanley a hyacinth bean,
an annual, so he wouldn't have to wait for the flowers.

He said, Mark, I have just the place for it!
as if he'd spent ninety-eight years

anticipating the arrival of this particular vine.

I thought poetry a brace against time,
the hours held up for study in a voice's cool saline,

but his allegiance is not to permanent forms.
His garden's all furious change,

budding and rot and then the coming up again;

why prefer any single part of the round?
I don't know that he'd change a word of it;

I think he could be forever pleased
to participate in motion. Something opens.

He writes it down. Heaven steadies
and concentrates near the lavender. He's already there.

The News from Fleabustan (a Pun It Took *Ten Months* to Occur to Me, WTF?), Plus Earthgirl's Power, Plus the Two Fourth of July Songs You'd Expect Me to Post

Too Late: Duty Has Become Habit, Habit a Duty

Fuck, the blogdays of summer, here's inside baseball to alienate everyone else, re: yesterday's United post - you do realize the danger of Shevchenko coming to United, yes, what a bullet that's been dodged that was never shot? Hear that sound Jill St John makes when she sees that Bombe Suprise? That's the sound Rosie, top shelf below, makes for treats. That EEE sound Jill St John makes when the kabobs are... wait, have I mentioned this?





....aflame? Rosie when we pick her up and put her in a room because she's on a vet-ordered diet. By the way, I may post links of the reflexive pukestorms over this week's SCOTUS rulings but I'm not going to flotsam in the SCOTUS pukestorm of jetsam this week, awoo. Somewhere Rod Dyachenko is failing another audition.

• Hi Stanley.
• Morality play.
• Rubes make marks' lives easy.
• The brain-dead talking point.
• Capitalism.
• Capitalism.
• Capitalism.
• I've long used my ten free reads of the fucking New York Times this month just clicking on links on other people's blogs, so I couldn't read David Brooks piece today on Springsteen (here's the sublede on the op-ed page: Bruce Springsteen's appeal is a reminder of our deeply human need to experience and express meaning within a bounded framework of a place, a people and a history) even if I wanted to, which I don't, it's another example of why the New York Times can go fuck itself for as long as I won't give them a fucking nickel.
• The first I've seen of the inevitable many mockings of the Brooks piece.
• Frances' alternative newspaper!
• Daily note of wonder at the deadness of Blegsylvania. Go scroll Because Right, open up to see all the blogs, note how long it's been since almost all have updated. Deadest Blog Days of Summer ever.
• Why Always Me makes me laugh in a happy way.
• My favorite new word is quilombo.
• Note that in the piece linked in monologue that says Shevchenko not coming to DC that Olsen will likely start Boskovic this coming Saturday and move DeRossario to withdrawn forward just like this guy said he should.
• More interesting than River Plate gaining promotion is that David Trezeguet, 57, is still playing professional soccer.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Edwin's review of Mantel, part two.
• Silliman's always awesome lit links.
• Yoko Ono + Thurston Moore + Kim Gordon.
• New Raveonettes song.
• I need to get tickets. New Dead Can Dance:
• Prunella notes the new album can be streamed here. Gonna buy tickets this week for the August 27 Wolftrap show. Hamster's in - anyone else?

[UNTITLED]

Lyn Hejinian

Lost after all. You can leave any time
This rat's like me, she has a human soul
Too late: duty has become habit, habit a duty
Poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away
But there's dance in the old dame yet
No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before

There Was a Small Butcher Shop in the North End of Boston Whose Specialty Was Inferior Foods

A MAN IN BLACK AND WHITE

Jack Gilbert

There was a small butcher shop in the North End
of Boston whose specialty was inferior foods.
Chicken feet and chicken heads. Gizzards, tripe,
and beef hearts. Salty fatback and wet brains.
Prosperous people came from the suburbs to pay
too much for the food they ate in hard times.
The man living with difficulty in the winter woods
remembers as he looks at the fresh raccoon tracks
in the snow and wonders if they will tug at him
in the Mediterranean light, if he will write
about the classical bareness of cold and truth
while eating the suckling pig and fried bananas
of Indonesia. Will he miss the Mill River
with its slags of ice and the sound of crows
in the silence. Some years ago, a child was asked
whether he liked radio or television best. The boy
said radio, because the pictures were better.





Jeebus, today deserves the above or it deserves the below.





Kidding. Death to the motherfucking either/or. Plus fuck City, fuck ManUtd.

Doesn't This Remind You of Those Things We've Done Before?

That pink putter in the basket is my bird on hole three at Seneca, though the four on 13C and three on 21B and 24C were sweet but the three on 26D was gold. Played back 9 then middle then front. Back: 3-4-3-5-3-3-4-3-4. Middle: 3-4-4-4-6-3-3-4-3 (but wasn't in the water - didn't go in all day, Dr Z twice). Front - skipped first, newby group of six-4-2-3-5-4-3-4-3. I've never putted better. I haven't played in two months. Holyfuck, beautiful day.

That's Stanley shot this morning from inside the stairwell to our basement looking out underneath the door to hallway. I need note that while I don't watch many movies - it's not a principled thing, I like them when I do, I just don't, I think to do other stuff - I recognize, as someone who organizes his music and poetry and fiction and everything into Desert Island lists, why the Oscars - and Emmys and Tonys and - are so popular, that popularity, like everything else, reminds me of my training. I've been warned to stay away from twooter the next four hours to avoid people who often complain about the taxonomies and methodologies of our ruling hierarchies competing to be the wittiest, wisest, and archest - what do you think of my entry submitted here? - twootergod of a popularity contest that celebrates the taxonomies and methodologies of our ruling hierarchies. I don't know movies to play this one, that's why I'm sitting this particular tournament out. Let's play Best Furs Song Ever!

In Aisle and Arch the Satin Secret Collects

Two hours Saturday, those boxes, that toy. Happiest cat I've ever. I've no idea why white-noise white-noised Stanley's purrs and trills the last 45 seconds, apologies.

Also too, the below is officially now this blog's Official Theme Song 5, I must have listened to it 25 times since I posted it and harder not faster, yo. I'm also petitioning the judge of my conscience to change the Shitty Desert Island Five game into the Shitty Desert Island Six game while I'm also petitioning the judge of my conscience throw out that motion, Yo La Tengo either becomes the fourth permanent member of the Shitty Desert Island Five or, if I want two rotation spots but want Yo La Tengo a permanent member kick out Kate Bush or Pere Ubu/David Thomas or Guided by Voices or shut the fuck up. I am also petitioning the judge of my conscience to ignore my obsessive/compulsive need to impose order and categories on the things that give me pleasure in response to my resentment at the imposition of order and categories on me by power that pisses me off. It's a feature of my training, not a bug.

• On technology and the classless society.
• Anarchism and teaching.
• The self-manufacturing of Romney. I confess, what bothers me the most about Romney is that he looks like Bryan Ferry.
• New Obama cinema?
• Bleggalgazing.
• Bleggalgazing.
• Kansas City Wizard fans called their renamed team the Sporks?
• The punk films of Amos Poe.
• Everybody thinks I'm a raincloud.
• God, I love Yo La Tengo.

[I rose from marsh mud]

Lorine Niedecker

I rose from marsh mud,
algae, equisetum, willows,
sweet green, noisy
birds and frogs

to see her wed in the rich
rich silence of the church,
the little white slave-girl
in her diamond fronds.

In aisle and arch
the satin secret collects.
United for life to serve
silver. Possessed.

The Hand That Puts Fish on the Saucer Has Changed, Too

That's Jess, who I never write about. She's younger than Sarah, older than Fleabus, eight, nine maybe? She's smart but bitter, resents Sarah and Fleabus and Stanley and Rose and Napoleon, torments Sarah since Sarah's old and is the only cat that can't kick Jess' ass. She doesn't meow or purr, she gacks and hisses. She walked up to me last night while I was reading and, for the first time ever, or at least since the last time that I've forgotten, made a please love me sound. You may or not have noticed, but I am making a conscious effort to be more tolerant towards all and everything that always piss me off, it's pissing people off; I'm not going to do the research, but I bet I say motherfucking crackers much less recently than I used to when I used to say it repeatedly every day. I picked her up, put her in my lap, rubbed her ears, she has beautiful green eyes. Stanley jumped on the sofa next to us, Jess hissed, ripped open a two inch gash in my right thigh leaping away.  

Here's Napoleon this morning in our dogwood tree.

• The first ad: who are the Nazis now?
• I am an Al-Q enabler!
• Obama's SOTU, authoritarian followership, civil society, part two.
• Obama, pragmatic hypocrite, I'm sure we'll be told.
• Vladimir Obama.
• Delusional psychopath deep in denial about criminal past. (That sentence from someone tweeting from New Left Project.)
• I swear to Baal, this is an actual headline on YFWP web as I type this: Romney Tries to Fend Off Santorum Surge as Three States Hold Contests.
• I confess, I'm still small enough to smile when Karl Rove gets pissy.
• Silk skin paws hang by both feet.
• If I'd known Madonna's halftime show would be a satanic ritual I might have watched.
• David Hockney's road home.
• This is true: I walk by a new book cart this morning, see a novel called Vaclav & Lena, three minutes later see this post of Biblioklept, went and grabbed the book.
• Here's 35 minutes of live PJ Harvey:

CAT IN AN EMPTY APARTMENT

Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Die - you can't do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here,
but nothing is the same.
Nothing has been moved,
but there's more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they're new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn't start
as it's usual time.
Something doesn't happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet has been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle towards him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and now leaps or squeals at least to start.

You Asked for Nothing, Why Don't You Share It

Stanley's butt has been professionally shaved by our new vet and balm applied to the rubbed raw skin about the pucker; he's embarrassed and uncomfortable in a much improved way. Rosie has (has had) a collapsed nostril and inflamed lymph nodes, a testament to the shittiness of our previous vets, the ones under whose care Rudy died in his sleep. The new vet, who has a giant cat named Shardik (yes, that Shardik, she confirmed), dosed Rosie with antibiotics and gave us hairball dissolvers to help end Rosie's diarrhea. The walk in the woods afterwards was wonderful.

Thanks for the Kind mentions of me and others by those participating in Blogroll Amnesty. As always, if you are Kinding me and me not you, please email me, and as always, thanks for reading. Regular programming resumes tomorrow, or not.

A Dog Drops a Bone, Another Dog Snatches It

We've been told that Stanley and Rose are not purebreds (which is why they were in rescue as young as they were) but are definitely in some large fraction Maine Coons:

Maine Coons develop slowly, and don't achieve their full size until they are three to five years old. Their dispositions remain kittenish throughout their lives; they are big, gentle, good-natured goofs. Even their voices set them apart from other cats; they have a distinctive, chirping trill which they use for everything from courting to cajoling their people into playing with them. (Maine Coons love to play, and many will joyfully retrieve small items.) They rarely meow, and when they do, that soft, tiny voice doesn't fit their size!

While Maine Coons are highly people-oriented cats, they are not overly-dependent. They do not constantly pester you for attention, but prefer to "hang out" with their owners, investigating whatever activity you're involved in and "helping" when they can. They are not, as a general rule, known as "lap cats" but as with any personality trait there are a few Maine Coons that prefer laps. Most Maine Coons will stay close by, probably occupying the chair next to yours instead. Maines will follow you from room to room and wait outside a closed door for you to emerge. A Maine Coon will be your companion, your buddy, your pal, but hardly ever your baby.

Maine Coons are relaxed and easy-going in just about everything they do. The males tend to be the clowns while the females retain more dignity, but both remain playful throughout their lives. They generally get along well with kids and dogs, as well as other cats. They are not as vertically-oriented as some other breeds, prefering to chase objects on the ground and grasping them in their large paws -- no doubt instincts developed as professional mousers. Many Maine Coons will play "fetch" with their owners.

YES! it's like that. Rose is funny, Stanley's hilarious. Neither has meowed though they never stop trilling, it's wonderful. We've learned five and a half indoor cats are too many, so, not counting the inevitable rescue that will be thrust upon us, if these are the last two until they die in twenty years, yay me. Fleabus?

Loves to play with them until she sees us seeing her play with them and then she gets pissy. It's like she's playing POTUS 12 on a blog. O and twooter, look at the twootwhore I am, 500+ twoots in less than two months, what to call twooter angst, it can't be called bleggalgazing (though this guy bleggalgazes his twooter angst). Truth in some small fraction is that twooter makes burying links like acorns for harvesting for next post easy, but still. Twooteroscopy?

• All photos by Planet.
  
• Villagers love this shit. I bet Diane Rehm devotes an entire segment of her smarmy and self-congratulatory Friday circle jerk to it.
• Thought experiment.
• Behind anomie lines.
• Shoot the messenger.
• Has Occupy been a dream?
• Decay of perspective.
• Romney: The curse of the trochee.
• This ripe moment.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• From Mr Fish:

• The very real danger of genetically modified food?
• Purple Line promotional video!
• There is no try. Speaking of twooter, I replied to a Goff twoot re: the ominous silence of DCU's offseason and was followed within fifteen minutes by ten people. 
• Loft and turf and Elkin.
• Serendipity: I literally pressed Against the Day into P's hands yesterday.
• Markson on Gaddis.
• Two new Goldbarth poems.
• Embarrassingly bad!
• A quick one before I go.
• Kuupuu.
• New Xiu Xiu for those of you who do. I don't (though I hear why those who do do), but two loved ones do.
• New Shins for those of you who do. I almost positive it's their bridges that keep me from loving.
• One hour of gorgeous.
• Holyfuck, thank you! Dangerous Minds, I don't think I've ever of these two Queen vids before:

SUBURBAN

Peter Cole

Conformity caught here, nobody catches it,
Lawns groomed in prose, with hardly a stutter.
Lloyd hits the ball, and Lorraine fetches it.

Mom hangs the laundry, Fred, Jr., watches it,
Shirts in the clichéd air, all aflutter.
Conformity caught here, nobody catches it.

A dog drops a bone, another dog snatches it.
I dreamed of this life once, Now I shudder
As Lloyd hits the ball and Lorraine fetches it.

A doldrum of leaky roofs, a roofer who patches it,
Lloyd prowls the streets, still clutching his putter.
Conformity caught here, nobody catches it.

The tediumed rake, the retiree who matches it, 
The fall air gone dead with the pure drone of motors
While Lloyd hits the ball, and Lorraine just fetches it.

The door is ajar, then somebody latches it.
Through the hissing of barbecues poets mutter 
Of conformity caught here, where nobody catches it.
Lloyd hits the ball. And damned Lorraine fetches it.

So Hologramic

Two bits of good news! Planet has been aiming her eye and camera at Stanley, a wondercat, chirper, clown. More photos tomorrow!

Also, a friend found the TVC15 I spent hours looking for this past weekend!



David Bowie & Klaus Nomi - TVC15 & Boys Keep... by ZapMan69